Category Archives: violence

Using the UN Security Council as a Pseudo-Court

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Security Council Chamber Mural (by Nick Jeffrey)

Security Council Chamber Mural (by Nick Jeffrey)

So, while all the real stuff is going on I’m also re-reading Judith Shklar’s Legalism (which is a fantastic book you should go read) and writing about reprobation in law. It’s an interesting juxtaposition.

At the same time, I was discussing Peter Levine’s insightful post on Syria over on YouFace, and talking about similar issues with one of my colleagues oh-my-goodness-in-person-in-meatspace-and-such.

If we take for granted for the moment (per implausible, I think, but that’s a different story) that the reason to make some military strikes on Syria is because Assad has used chemical weapons, it’s an interesting question whether it matters that the US will not be getting authorization from the UN Security Council (UNSC) or, it seems, even being backed up by the UK.

First off, some folks have pointed out that the Geneva Conventions are super-old, and Syria is not a party to the Chemical Weapons Convention. This is a red herring, I think. It is entirely plausible that a customary norm of international law has developed that parallels the treaty norm banning chemical weapons, given the long history and wide scope of the taboo. If you wanted to argue that it was even a jus cogens norm, I wouldn’t laugh at you.

But, just as it would for domestic matters, it worries many people – myself included – to have a single state, especially one with all the geopolitical baggage that the US brings in general and to Syria in particular, serve as judge/jury/executioner on a norm violation like this. In the domestic case, we would typically want a court to pronounce guilt. And in the international case, it’s pretty common to look to the UNSC as a kind of pseudo-court, even though it isn’t.

One of the finicky bits of the post-UN Charter international system is that the creation of the UN mucked with traditional principles of international law in ways that we’re still working out. The big one here is obviously the simultaneous principles of averting war through reinforcing the norm of non-intervention in internal affairs of states and protecting and upholding human rights… which often involves the internal affairs of states.

But a subtler one that is coming up here, I think, is: in traditional conceptions of international law, because there is no international sovereign, states are responsible for norm-enforcement and maintenance (Realists think of the international system as a Hobbesian state of nature, but for traditional international law, it’s more like a Lockean state of nature). If you break an international rule, you are punished by your fellow states. This is even built into Augustinian just war theory – rather than self-defense being extended to things like “humanitarian intervention” or norm-enforcement, the right of self-defense against unjust aggression is an instance of the general right (/obligation) to punish injustice.

The UN Charter undercuts that image of international society without really replacing it. There still is a vestige of it on the economic plane: while only the UNSC can impose economic sanctions that are binding on all states (in virtue of their treaty obligation to obey decisions on such things by the UNSC), individual states can impose their own economic sanctions on each other (subject to the rules of other trade regimes, but that’s another story). So if you can get enough states to, e.g., embargo Cuba because you think they are violating human rights, you can enforce human rights norms that way.

But you cannot use force to enforce norms, at least not uncontroversially, because of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. There’s some argument here – Belgium famously argued in the FRY v. NATO case that because humanitarian interventions don’t aim to conquer, they are not violations of “independence” or “territorial integrity,” and the R2P report (but not the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document) argues that coalitions or individual states should be able to step in if the UNSC doesn’t live up to its obligations – but at the very least if you try to use force to punish someone for chemical weapons use under the theory that it’s not a 2(4) violation, your lawyers should cringe a bit. Article 51 reserves the right of self-defense to states, but it’d be hard here to claim that Syria’s use of chemical weapons was an act of aggression against the US.

At the same time, the kind of Lockean social contract bargain that we’re used to is incomplete on the international scale. The UN, and in particular the UNSC is charged with maintenance of international peace and security, which at least on the face of it is different from enforcement of all international norms (and keep in mind that on conservative readings, that “international” is understood as “between nations” not as “anywhere in the world”). The UNSC is not expected to take up all norm-violations it can, it does not have to abide by the decisions of international legal bodies like the ICJ, and it does not have to justify its decisions in terms of international law.

Now, we may be moving in the direction of making it more like an international court. There is a long-standing proposal to have a norm of a “Responsibility Not to Veto” (RN2V) at the UNSC, where the P5 nations would agree (this would be a social norm, not an enforceable law, obviously) not to use their veto to block humanitarian interventions. Were such a norm observed, it would make the UNSC more court-like, as at least the P5 would be bound in this one way to make their decisions on “legal” rather than “political” grounds. Right now, for instance, it is entirely possible for Russia to simply say, “yep, Assad used chemical weapons, but he’s our ally, so we don’t care, suck it.”

And my colleague pointed out to me that the best way of understanding the increasing traction of R2P may be as a change to the understood meaning of “international peace and security,” rather than as a norm permitting action in violation of the UN Charter (or reinterpreting Art. 2(4)). On this view, we are moving toward a situation where the UNSC would understand all violations of international law (or at least all violations relating to human rights and use of force) as threats to international peace and security, even if there were no such threat in a lay sense (violence is unlikely to spill across a border, etc.). This would make the UNSC more court-like in a different way, by giving it a more clearly norm-based mandate.

And as Peter pointed out, there is an important court-like function that the UNSC already plays. One of the problems with both deterrence and reprobation is that they require that you be able to communicate why the punishment is coming down. I mean, Kafka made a career writing about what law is like when the communicative function fails – it make the state into a brute, mysterious, soul-crushing threat. If military strikes on Syria are to have the (again, let’s assume for right now) intended effect of communicating the international community’s condemnation of chemical weapons use, it needs to be clear that that is why they are happening – before we even get to issues about whether it makes sense to treat the Syrian government as a criminal rather than Assad personally, etc.

In the current situation, that is far from assured. Plenty of people, myself included, and probably Assad included, are very skeptical that any US strike would really be motivated by our concern over chemical weapons. The water is too muddied by the fact that we were instrumental in letting pass two of the only other confirmed state uses of chemical weapons in the modern era, since both were by our ally Iraq, back when it was our ally (during the Iran-Iraq War, and then during the campaign against the Kurds); and, by the fact that the US has been sabre-rattling against Assad for so long now that it’s pretty plausible that chemical weapons are just a pretext for striking him and trying to tip the balance in favor of the rebels (not to mention that the US claims to have more certain intelligence on the chemical weapons than the UN has, or than the US is willing to make publicly available, further fueling the concerns of anyone who thinks that chemical weapons is a golden opportunity, rather than enforcement being a choice we’ve been backed into reluctantly and only because of the massive norm issues at stake). On the flip side, since the UK vote, I have seen many people say things along the lines of “now it is even more important to do something, since the UK has shown it doesn’t give a shit about chemical weapons.” But of course the UK’s – political, not legal – decision is also subject to the multiple interpretations that political decisions always are. Most of the parliamentarians who voted against military action would surely justify their vote in terms of things like their uncertainty of Assad’s weapons use, or their obligation to wait for the UN, or their (Realist-y) obligation to look after their constituents before international norms (it doesn’t show that I “don’t care” about crime if I spend time with my daughter instead of becoming a vigilante), or their opposition to enforcing the norm through military strikes etc.

As Peter drove home in conversation, going through the UNSC could help with this problem. While the UNSC is not a legal body, it shares with legal bodies at least some commitment to public reasoning – anyone can go read the transcripts of UNSC meetings, and find at least the public reasons for votes (no one can force members of the UNSC, any more than judges, not to argue disingenuously, of course). And while there is no rule about it, the social norms surrounding the UN stop Russia from arguing in the nakedly Realist way I suggested above. Ambassadors speaking in UNSC meetings at least pay lip service to international law and morality in making their arguments. So, to the extent that a vote to authorize the use of force against Syria could be gotten from the UNSC it would bring the communicative advantage of being not just a brute decision, but of being one that comes attached with “and our reasons are thus-and-so.”

Reading Shklar brings to mind at least one way in which the UNSC may be superior to a court, by the way. She points out the ideological nature of assuming that the realm of law and rules is somehow purer and cleaner than the realm of politics and compromise. One of the weirdnesses, to me, of this whole argument, is that we’ve drawn the red line around chemical weapons. Morally, surely, the best argument for getting militarily involved in Syria is that civilians are being killed, not the particular manner of their deaths. The use of chemical weapons may show the desperation of the Assad regime, but it is neither here nor there in terms of their cruelty. And even if you’re looking for an international norm violation, intentional targeting of civilians already is one!

So I worry that searching for a way to fit Syria into a discussion of international law distorts our approach to the situation. It possibly commits us to symbolic “retaliation” for the chemical weapons use that does not much change the situation on the ground. And it tries to hide the ambiguity of the situation by letting us say, “chemical weapons are bad, and whatever the folks we like have done they haven’t used chemical weapons, so now we have a bright line, and if you’re over it, you’re an evil asshole.” Again, I don’t have a solution to the Syrian situation ready to hand, and I’m frighteningly ill-informed about the internal dynamics of the country. But it strikes me that trying to get closer to a solution by looking for a clean legal principle that will maybe attract consensus on the principle without actually clearing up the lack of consensus on the situation or what can be done is precisely the wrong way to go. Letting the UNSC be the non-legal entity that it is might be the better solution than trying to make it more legalistic. If the US goes ahead with military strikes, it will be doing so in the name of some “higher law” that transcends the messy details of the situation, but it might be better to try to hash out those details in public if we actually want to keep people from dying, rather than just ensuring that they die from napalm instead of gas.

 

Everything I Know About Syria (Pt. 1?)

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sy-map

I can find it on a map. (Source: CIA World Factbook)

I’m a little worried about all the folks who have strong opinions about what we should do in Syria who don’t seem to know much more about it than I do. So, I’m not going to try to tell you what we should do, but as a philosopher, what worries me before we even get to that worry is that the conversations about Syria often seem a bit confused. I suspect at least some of that may be on purpose, but I can’t prove anything so you didn’t hear it from me.

Bottom line up front: A lot of people are talking about Syria right now as if we’re going to go in to punish chemical weapons use. But the real interest seems to be in using that justification to drive a plan that actually aims to do more. It’s really hard to determine how to “punish” chemical weapons use appropriately, and if we try to do more without admitting it and hence doing more than just bombing, we’re likely to fail at everything on the table. Worse, I worry that there’s genuine conceptual confusion and blurring here among people making decisions (in particular, various ways of being “against Assad” being lumped together and both their motivations and strategies being treated as interchangeable).

First, I think it’s helpful to set some outside boundaries to keep any discussion of it in context.

As Yglesias points out (hey, when he’s right, he’s right), even if everything in Syria goes according to plan and swimmingly, military intervention in Syria is likely to be a very expensive way of helping people there. If all you care about is lives saved, it’s a serious challenge to ask why we don’t spend our money saving lives in contexts where, frankly, lives are easier to save.

There are all sorts of rejoinders possible here. As I myself have argued, it is quite morally plausible that it is more morally pressing to save people whose lives are being lost as a result of injustice than mere misfortune. And while it’s hard to assess this kind of outcome (which does not mean we shouldn’t try) someone could make the argument that a military intervention that stops a war significantly earlier than it would otherwise have stopped may save very many lives (especially when you count in the indirect costs of war, like disease and poverty) and so be more “cost-effective” than a quick calculation would show. That said, I think security folks should take it more seriously than we sometimes do that, if our principle really is “we have an obligation to save lives,” the burden of proof is often on military intervention to prove that it’s a better place to direct resources than other areas (when in actual policy fact, it’s often treated as if it’s the other way around).

The other is that we – “we” here meaning especially USians – need to avoid power fantasy. It may just be that there’s nothing we can feasibly do from here that gets everyone everything they want and a pony. “Syrians are still dying” is only a good rebuttal if we’re confident that there’s a course of action we take that can impact that.

That said, I think there are two questions that I wish some of the discussion would be clearer on. Both of them go to the broader question of how we would even define “success” here. One is, “what is the nature of our interest here,” which I’m going to leave aside for the moment, just because I need to do real work at some point today. The other is:

What is This Intervention About?

Punishing a violation of the chemical weapons “red line”

Off the bat, I’m just going to assume for the sake of this argument that the Assad regime did in fact use chemical weapons.

Right now, the official arguments in favor of US intervention in Syria seem to be focused on Assad’s chemical weapons use. This is, in fact, a violation of international law, and plausibly a serious moral violation. More serious than killing bunches of civilians with non-banned weapons? I don’t know (morally), but let’s at least grant that it’s a plausible reason to sit up and take notice.

But it’s less obvious than it may seem how bombing is related to this red line. The simplest theory is a purely retributivist one. Assad’s actions and those of his regime merit punishment and so they should be punished. If that’s our theory, it’s less clear why bombing military targets in the civil war is the right punishment. Difficult as it might be to actually do, this sounds like an argument in favor of apprehending and trying Assad (and perhaps other folks involved in the actual decision to use poison gas). And if you’re a pure retributivist, “it is hard to get proper retribution” is no more a reason for deviance than “punishing someone won’t deter anyone” is.

It seems particularly problematic to focus on retribution because most of the people dying from the bombing would be either civilians or regime combatants, not Assad and his inner circle. If we were going to war with Syria, you could argue that all combatants on the side of the regime are legitimate targets, and so they have no complaint if they are bombed to death, but punishing Assad is arguably not exactly going to war. And even if it’s legitimate to kill them, the idea that killing his combatants and Syrian civilians (even ones loyal to Assad) is inherently a punishment for Assad relies on the very arguable assumption that Assad cares a whole lot about them.

So, I doubt that pure retribution is actually what most people have in mind, in this sense, when they talk about a need to intervene because Assad has crossed the chemical weapons red line.

The worry is that we now start walking up to the line of saying that the intervention is not about punishing the chemical weapons use, but about getting rid of Assad himself. And, politically if not morally, that then provokes the question, “if this is about Assad losing, why didn’t we get involved sooner?”

If we want to stay on the chemical weapons side of that red line, there are two ways we could do it.

First, we could try to say that this is not a punishment strategy at all, but a denial one. To back that up, we would have to carefully attack all and only targets that were directly involved with chemical weapons production and use. Yes, that might change the balance of power a bit, but maybe that’s a side effect. The plan would not be so much to make Assad pay for using them, but to ensure that they literally could not be used in the future. So, for instance, if Assad were to box up all the chemical weapons and mail them to a UN cantonment area tomorrow, we’d be done and walk away, no further need to get involved.

Second, we could say that the appropriate punishment is just that Assad’s chances of winning the civil war be lowered by X%. I’ll admit, this just seems weird to me as a punishment.

Third, we could say that the intervention isn’t about punishment or about denial but about deterrence. I’m going to leave aside the idea that it’s about deterring other potential chemical weapons-users, and just focus on Assad. The idea might be that we send him this message: “we will stay out of this, unless you use chemical weapons. Then we’ll take action to make you more likely to lose.”

This is structurally similar to an approach that has been used in the US against violent crime to some extent. Basically, while no one is legalizing drugs, to send a message to violent street organizations that the real focus is on the violence, not the drugs. For instance, under the Boston CeaseFire model, gang leaders were more or less straight-up told: if you peacefully deal drugs, all you have to worry about is normal narcotics enforcement, but if you are involved in violence we will throw the full weight of all our special federal money and enforcement resources against you.

This seems to work pretty well, but you really have to not care about the drugs that much. If Assad believes that there is no way that the US and its allies will let him remain in power, no matter what he does, then he will never believe that our intervention is keyed only to his chemical weapons use, and we won’t be able to specifically deter him from using them. Basically, he would need to believe that if he refrains from using them, we would largely leave him alone to win or lose. For better or worse, it’s pretty reasonable for him to be skeptical of that at this point.

What I suspect is in a lot of people’s heads, though, when they point at chemical weapons use in Syria, is not any of this. It’s something more like, “Assad used chemical weapons; this should prove to anyone who was doubting up until now that he doesn’t deserve to be in charge of Syria.”

Removing Assad from Power

This is more straightforward, as a goal! For some people, the motivation might be tied up to some extent with the use of chemical weapons, but they would not think it acceptable for Assad to remain in power, even if he never used chemical weapons.

Frankly, it seems unlikely to me that, were (per improbable) the UN team to say, “we have definitively determined that no chemical weapons were used,” most of the people I know or read who are hawkish on Syria would suddenly say, “I guess it’s all cool now, nevermind.” On the flip side, I doubt very many people were on the fence about this, but then changed their mind about whether or not Assad was a bad guy once chemical weapons were used.

If all we wanted to do was see Assad dead or deposed, it might not be that difficult. Here’s where “I am not a Syria expert” becomes important, but even without boots on the ground, we could massively arm rebels, carry out airstrikes, etc. and probably stand a decent chance of changing the tide.

The problem with this would be what the aftermath looked like. Libya, the closest analogy to this kind of plan, is a worrisome one. It’s hotly contested in the circles I run in whether Libya was “successful” (partly for reasons like these, where I don’t think everyone agrees on what “success” looks like), but I think I can pretty uncontroversially say that the situation in Libya right now, post-intervention, is far from ideal. The worry would be that, OK, you get rid of Assad, but now you’ve got someone else pretty bad (if not equally bad, but maybe even worse) in charge. I mean, Maliki and Karzai maybe clear the low bar of “better than the last guys,” but not by a whole lot.

One consistent approach would be to say, that if this is punishment to Assad and his regime for using chemical weapons, or even for broader crimes like attacking civilians, that doesn’t matter. When we throw a violent criminal in prison, maybe it’s not our job to worry about whether another violent criminal will take his place (until it comes time to punish the successor).

But it seems like most people who are hawkish on Syria want something more than that.

Protecting Civilians

This is a fraught one, and one where the empirical details are even more important. In fact, as we go up this scale, in general, deep knowledge of the nuances of the Syrian situation gets more and more important.

One way to go is to simply collapse this into a different option. We are protecting civilians by removing Assad, who is killing them. Or, we are protecting civilians from chemical weapons attacks.

If you want to focus in specifically on civilian protection, though, I think we’d have to be going about this in a very different way than we’re talking about going about it right now.

Now, I have a rep (Having a rep requires being known – Ed.) for being skeptical of the ability of militaries to protect civilians. But it doesn’t seem impossible for them to do some good. The intervention in Kosovo likely saved some lives, and there’s a reason why people retroactively appeal to things like India’s intervention in East Bengal and Vietnam’s overthrow of the Khmer Rouge to justify norms of humanitarian intervention. Heck, even France’s Operation Turquoise in Rwanda probably gets a worse rap than it deserves (saving civilians because you’re internationally embarrassed, or because they are the civilians aligned with your genocidal allies is still saving civilians).

But what’s currently being proposed most places isn’t like these operations. The most common comparison I hear is to Kosovo, but what’s important to keep in mind is that the aerial bombing campaign was followed up by a massive ground rebuilding project, involving not only a major NATO operation (KFOR) but one of the UN’s few full-on transitional administration missions (UNMIK). I’m pretty confident that no policy makers in the US are planning on deploying an Iraq- or Afghanistan-level US occupation force to try to rebuild things and protect civilians once the initial onslaught is blunted.

Because, keep in mind, it’s not as if Assad and chemical weapons are the only threats to civilians out there! If we imagined that we snapped our fingers and Assad disappeared from existence, civilians would still be under direct threats from continued social violence, ambiguous criminal/political violence, and getting caught up in the infighting between armed factions trying to assert control. They would also be under indirect threat from poverty, destroyed infrastructure (which bombing often makes worse), disease, and the like. So if what you care about is civilians don’t die rather than the much narrower Assad doesn’t kill civilians, it’s hard to imagine that you will accomplish your goal just through an aerial campaign, even if you believe that an aerial campaign was a key and successful part of the strategy in Kosovo. Yes, if you point out that ethnic cleansing accelerated during the bombing campaign, many people will rightly point out that there was then a return of large numbers of displaced after it was over; but it’s a hard thing to argue that the situation would have been perceived as safe enough for that without the presence of KFOR/UNMIK or something similar in the aftermath.

There may be answers to this, but the question for anyone pushing intervention as civilian protection should be, “what is the analogue to KFOR and UNMIK in the Syrian situation?”

There’s also, I think, a darker side to this. Like folks who say that we need to preserve “stability” in Syria, it’s not at all obvious that being against Assad is the way to go here. I wouldn’t particularly want to live in Assad’s Syria pre-civil-war, but the fact remains that I would stand a much lower chance of being killed there than in civil war Syria. Civil wars, even totally justified and understandable ones, are bad for your health and safety. In fact, the hard-nosed argument often is that we end war first and then worry about justice in a situation where fewer people are getting blown up.

By most of what I see, the balance of power in Syria is still somewhat favorable to Assad (and certainly would have been absent support to the rebels from a number of US allies). So if you really want to just make sure civilians are safe, then I think we need to take seriously the idea that we ought to throw our weight behind Assad. On the one hand, this is arguably morally odious (though it’s basically the deal we’ve been happy to accept in other places, most saliently Bahrain). On the other hand, if you don’t want to make that deal with the devil, maybe it’s not just civilian protection you care about…

Resolving the Conflict

Read this with an implied rider of something like, “in a just way,” or “and creating a more legitimate democracy there.”

Again, I suspect this is what many hawks have in mind as their goal. Not just that the civil war grinds on, but without poison gas, or that Assad loses and who cares what takes his place. At the very least, most seem to have in mind that “nothing could be worse than Assad” (of course, things could).

But the imagined ideal outcome is, maybe not Sweden, but some kind of human-rights-respecting (basically) democracy (basically).

Here we hit the point of maximal “you would need to know more about Syria than I do to figure out how to do this properly.” But, like protecting civilians, I think you can’t reasonably have this as your goal without countenancing some kind of much larger, longer-term intervention than people currently seem to be talking about.

And though the dark side of this is less dark than just going for civilian-protection-via-stability-under-anyone, there’s at least a way in which this pulls against current rhetoric. I suspect that the surest route to something like this would be a negotiated transition, where Assad keeps some power for a while and likely a rich and comfortable life somewhere forever. He’s a bad guy, but he also still has power and supporters, both within and without the country. And there are some bad guys on the side we USians like, too – those al-Qaeda linked brigades are supported by someone, and let’s not pretend the secularists are saints either (again, whether they hop the “better than Assad bar” only gets you so far). Some kind of managed transition probably requires all the UNMIK-like apparatus of protecting civilians in the aftermath of the war, plus currently-not-forthcoming political will from at least Russia and the US+allies to get the regime and the rebels (respectively) to agree to it, something neither seems to want to do.

THE LIKELIHOOD OF BEING TOTALLY WRONG THREAT LEVEL OF THIS POST IS: RED

On Not Speaking in a Language They Can Understand

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riot

Banksy, “Flower Chucker 2″(?)

I’m going to do two terribly irresponsible things in this post. First, I’m going to at least tangentially touch on the current situation in Egypt, a subject on which I am both horrified and woefully uninformed. Second, I’m going to be obnoxious based on the title of an article, which I well know is not necessarily endorsed by its writer, and in this case when I finished reading it, bore relatively little (but not no) relationship to the content of the article itself.

Also, I need to remind you that this is my venue for half-baked, incorrect, and underthought ideas. You need to pay if you want the good stuff, or come inside the ivory tower, obvs.

But on the plus side, holy schnikes, it’s a post that’s actually relevant to some of the stuff I’m supposed to, you know, professionally think about.

Anyway, the article that got me thinking about this stuff most recently was William Dobson’s “Lost in Egypt,” whose long subtitle is “President Obama has no influence with Egypt’s generals. It’s time the administration admits it—and speaks a language the generals understand.” It’s that last bit – a language the generals understand that I want to riff on for a sec.

My day job being horror and violence (i.e., security studies-ish), I hear variations on this argument a lot, that when dealing with particularly violent groups, there’s no point in trying to see where they’re coming from, or negotiating with them, or what have you, you need to meet them in kind. Probably the most seminal expression of this viewpoint in my field is Stephen John Stedman’s 1997 article “Spoiler Problems in Peace Processes.” In a nutshell, Stedman argues that we can divide “spoilers” – groups that oppose peace processes – into three types: limited, greedy, and total.

Limited spoilers are what they sound like. They want some specific thing, and if you give it to them, they will become peaceful. Most of the time (Stedman argues, and many follow him), the way to deal with them is to give them what they want.

Greedy spoilers don’t want to fight forever, but they want to salami-slice you. Give a greedy spoiler an inch and it’ll come back and ask for a mile. They will keep fighting and dragging their feet as long as they think they can maybe get more. So you deal with them most effectively through a “departing train” strategy – we’re doing final divvying up of the rewards of a peace process now and if you don’t say, “OK, we are fine with this, and just this, no more fooling,” you get NOTHING.

Total spoilers are… well, read my book for some of the conceptual confusions I think are involved in this category. But they’re the folks you can’t deal with. Either there is nothing that will make them stop fighting (they desire the war for its own sake), or they want something completely non-negotiable – e.g., they’ll stop fighting if you let them straight up genocide some group. You have to kill or neutralize them.

In my experience, there’s a lot of pressure to put the bogeyman of the moment into the “total spoiler” category. Why are we dragging our feet on Syria? Why don’t you want to bomb Libya – do you love Qaddafi? Why did Nelson Mandela play so nice with Mugabe? Etc. Implicit in these questions is that one (and, typically, only one!) of the players is so irredeemably evil that there’s no point trying to deal with them.

But this claim is really worrisome, and not just for someone with my optimistic Lederach-derived moral intuitions about people. First of all, it’s ahistorical (again something I bring up in the book – e.g., in the DR Congo, at one time the CNDP were figured as “total spoilers” and the national army allied with the FDLR against them; later, the FDLR were figured as “total spoilers” and the CNDP was integrated into the national army to fight against them – meanwhile, the FDLR have a complicated – dysfunctional, but complicated – relationship with the actual people in their areas of operations.).

But I want to focus for a sec on how it interacts with the “language they understand” claim. The general intuition seems to be that the bad guys – whoever they may be in this situation – have set the terms of the debate, and we must follow them there or risk irrelevancy.

Why would we want to let the bad guys set the terms of the debate? Let’s grant, e.g., that the Egyptian army has decided that it is going to make the current conflict there about who can wield superior force. They are assholes and we should not listen to them.

We should also not ignore the power of the terms of the debate to constrain our options. We all want an outcome where no one gets hurt and everyone is happy, right (RIGHT)? It’s just that it’s only hippie dippie peaceniks like me who think that’s possible.

But think about the ways in which letting the terms of engagement be set in violence makes the peaceniks wrong rather than simply recognizing our wrongness. The most chilling part of Carol Cohn’s “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals, to me, is the way she reports that living in the world of “threat advantage” and “deep earth penetrators” (snicker) colonized her own mind. If your language is that of rational choice theory, it’s very hard to admit that the world also includes psychology, love, hope, fear, trauma, and the like. And then you sneer at the hippies like me for bringing them up. It’s not the peaceniks who made that world, man, you’re the ones trying to make us live in it.

And here’s where it goes from being a peacenik’s lament to a real policy problem. Using a conceptual and linguistic framework where you can only understand each other’s actions in terms of threats and advantage not only impoverishes the world, it carries very real risks of creating and exacerbating the violence you claim you’re there to prevent. Denying and obscuring that we’re dealing with human beings who have a psychology and a political physiology doesn’t make it go away.

There’s pretty good evidence that violence exhibits attributes of a contagion. The mechanisms are still being researched by psychologists smarter than me, but they include imitation and reduction of psychological barriers to aggressive actions in the victims of aggression. It looks like attributing an aggressive motive to your interlocutor is more likely to make you act aggressively towards them, too.

So, where does this leave us? If we use the language of threat and interest, we will see our enemies pursuing their interests, through threats, and responding reliably only to threats – whether those of violence, or of other forms of harm (e.g., economic). How sad is our state of understanding of conflict if the thought process on a place like Egypt is that we consider shooting, then cutting off aid, and then throw up our hands? (“Oh, but we did talk to the generals about peace.” “Really? Did you appeal to them as human beings or did you make a public diplomatic statement in an ambient discourse of threats?”). And so we speak to them in the language of threat and interest. And they respond in kind. And we wonder where the violence came from.

Alternatively, what if we spoke to them in a language that they didn’t “understand?” What if we spoke a language that allowed for all that hippy-dippy stuff about love and peace to be a real part of the discourse, that recognized the fear and anger that goes around in these sorts of situations? It’s hard to assess a policy that’s so rarely been tried, but the evidence is suggestive: violence interrupters in Chicago, family group conferencing as part of restorative justice programs, mass moral shaming.

If you want a philosophical homily, the mistake seems to be tied to one that Arendt accused thinkers of making: conflating power and violence. Both can get someone to do what you want. But violence does it by short-cutting the person, attacking them on a lizard-brain level and getting them to jump to out of fear; power does it by coordinating actions and making people move along with you out of solidarity. You can, if you try very hard, turn a violence advantage into a power advantage, by systematically smashing down all other sources of power until yours is the only one left standing, and people go along out of sheer moral exhaustion. My fear is that we – people like me, playing a part in a very powerful military nation – have spent so much time hammering down every source of power that we’re in danger of losing the meaningful ability to speak in the register of power rather than the register of violence. We’re projecting an inability to understand any other language onto the other by convincing ourselves that speaking violence is one way of speaking power, and that the other is refusing to respond to other ways. When in fact we have only atavistic non-violent language to use, empty rituals from power-building, and so if the other started responding to power we wouldn’t even recognize it. It’d be like Wittgenstein’s lion.

OK, if you’re not a philosopher, retroactively skip that last paragraph so I don’t sound in(s)ane. If you are a philosopher, commence nitpicking my abuse of Arendt.

Mobile Connectivity in Africa: Increasing the Likelihood of Violence?

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Regarding the above picture of DRC government troops with their mobile phones, Alexis Madrigal from the Atlatinc wrote in his column last year:

I don’t know what to say about this photograph aside from suggesting that an enterprising PhD student write a dissertation on “Cell Phones in War.” How are fighting, killing, and controlling territory different when you can call your brother after battle, post a photo of your squadron on the march to Facebook, or play Angry Birds between skirmishes?

Part of the answer to Alexis’ question comes in a newly published article in the American Political Science Review by postdoctoral fellow Jan Pierskalla and PhD candidate Florian Hollenbach (ht the Monkey Cage).

In a nutshell, the authors’ findings suggest that cell phone coverage in Africa increases the likelihood of political violence. The abstract is below:

The spread of cell phone technology across Africa has transforming effects on the economic and political sphere of the continent. In this paper, we investigate the impact of cell phone technology on violent collective action. We contend that the availability of cell phones as a communication technology allows political groups to overcome collective action problems more easily and improve in-group cooperation, and coordination. Utilizing novel, spatially disaggregated data on cell phone coverage and the location of organized violent events in Africa, we are able to show that the availability of cell phone coverage significantly and substantially increases the probability of violent conflict. Our findings hold across numerous different model specifications and robustness checks, including cross-sectional models, instrumental variable techniques, and panel data methods.

It will be interesting to see how this paper resonates with different audiences, such as the ICT4D community and political scientists. Some have already started to question the methodology and underlying assumptions in the paper.

But despite the findings of this study, like it or not, at some point technology cheerleaders will have to come to terms with a simple fact: if technology helps us overcome problems of collective action, there’s no reason to believe that this can only happen when it comes to virtuous collective action. And it shouldn’t take a PhD to know that.

Read the full paper here [PDF].


Laughter and Forgiveness (An Addendum)

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"Laugh," by The Doctr on Flickr.

“Laugh,” by The Doctr on Flickr.

Originally laughter contained a feeling of pleasure in prey or food which seemed certain. A human being who falls down reminds us of an animal we might have hunted and brought down ourselves. Every sudden fall which arouses laughter does so because it suggests helplessness and reminds us that the fallen can, if we want, be treated as prey. If we went further and actually ate it, we would not laugh. We laugh instead of eating it… As Hobbes said, laughter expresses a sudden feeling of superiority, but he did not add that it only occurs when the normal consequences of this superiority do not ensue. (Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, 223)

Over on Facebook, Anotherpanacea raised a good point about my last post on mocking the hierarchical.  To paraphrase: if my target is hierarchy, why am I suggesting that we make fun of people who like it – isn’t mocking and laughter a tool for showing who is on top and who is not?

It can be but it need not be. Laughter can be a powerful tool for human connection and forgiveness as well. Fundamentally, we laugh at the frailty and vulnerability of the human condition. I laugh when Louis C.K. talks about being a shitty Dad, because I see in his stories (and his superior comic timing) my own ardent desire to be a perfect father, and inevitable failures. When I was doing research in Liberia, one of the “peace women” told my colleague that they were able to get a powerful politician on their side by having the oldest woman in their group indignantly insist that he honor his mother, at which he laughed and said that because he was a soldier and they were mothers, they both knew pain and he would help them.

But when we laugh with someone, we importantly laugh at our shared frailty and vulnerability and failure. We are saying that we are unwilling to give a charade of honor and weight to the human stupidity they have shown, but that ultimately that stupidity connects us, rather than dividing us.

The paradox here is very much like the paradox of forgiveness. To forgive, we must simultaneously hold on to the view that the other person did wrong – deciding that there was no transgression is not forgiveness – but not following that recognition to its “normal consequences” in judgment and punishment.

So, when I want to mock the hierarchical, two things. First, I am mocking myself. I live a pretty comfy life on the backs of people less well-off than I am. I need forgiveness for all the time I’ve spent writing blogs instead of gleaning food, and all the money I’ve spent on Wonder Woman comics instead of sending to BRAC. I’m laughing at myself so that I can look myself in the mirror a little more clearly.

Second, as a result, I am laughing because I ultimately want social reconciliation, for all the romance of class war. The hierarchs are hurting. So, for all the mean-ness of the last post, ultimately, laughter is the proposed weapon because it holds the hope of everyone saying, “wow, that was a fucked way of setting things up, let us do something different now.”

What We Should Mock About When We Mock About Guns

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6980930398_f046c9cb12_c

“Heavy Weapons Guy and Vash the Stampede” by 5of7 on Flickr.

 

“Enjoy your guns, gun owners. I hope they make you happy in a way that breathing, smiling six-year old children cannot.” – Jon Rosenberg, Scenes From a Multiverse.

[EDIT: So, that quote seemed like a good idea at 11PM when I finished this post and slapped it up there, but in retrospect I think sets the wrong tone for a lot of the discussion here. I'm not zapping it out of existence, because no one should forget that I'm a dick, but I'm retracting my endorsement of it.]

Let me start with a controversial claim: to heck with The Matrix Revolutions. Straight to heck.

We’re going to get to guns. We need to, that’s the whole driver behind the existence of this blog! Anotherpanacea has been bugging me to blog for a while now, and so I promised that the first time I had something extended to say on the internet, I would blog about it rather than emailing him or having a really painful extended Twitter conversation about it.  And so I was thinking about his recent series of posts on gun control, and thought “I should email Anotherpanacea about this,” and then thought: shit.  So now I’ve got a blog, and we’re going to get to guns, and we’re going to get back to The Matrix Revolutions, but first we’re going to talk a little bit about my boltcutters.

I own a pair of boltcutters.  I bought them for an utterly mundane, bourgeois purpose – we have a padlock on our back gate, and over the winter it irretrievably seized up from moisture getting inside and freezing and mucking up whatever magical mechanisms make locks work, and so I had to take the garbage out by walking it all the way down the hall and then all the way down the sidewalk to the back of the property where the alley is and garbage is heavy and stinks, as you may have noticed.  So I went to my friendly neighborhood hardware store (that doesn’t sell kitchen scales because they kept getting stolen by heroin dealers for weighing stuff – which, seriously, are the margins on heroin so bad you’re stealing scales?) and bought some boltcutters. I’ve since used them on that darn lock, another one that froze up, some bolts (go figure!) that got embedded in the bed frame (long, not at all risque, story), and the splendid ring you can see me sporting in the first post.

YAWN.

BUT.  Did you actually click the link on “boltcutters” above?  If not, go do it.  It’s relevant, and it is just a righteous fucking song.

Boltcutters are more than just a tool. I am not nearly as cool as the vacant-squatting, private-property-disdaining Doomtree crew, but when I pick up my boltcutters to do even something kind of mundane, I hear in my head, “my girl gave me a boltcutter, we like to break in…”

One day, some yahoo locked their bike through my bike at Penn Station. I was annoyed, you might expect.  I couldn’t leave until this wanker got back from wherever zie was… wanking, maybe?  I don’t like to imagine that zie had had to park in a hurry because of the emergency brain surgery, as it harshes my rage buzz. But more importantly for the issue at hand, I was thinking, “man, I bet I could get my boltcutters…”  I don’t normally even contemplate the destruction of other people’s property, but knowing I had a metal-crushing device at home, and with my head filled with romantic anarchistic fantasies of the efficacy of crushing metal in achieving social justice/petty revenge, I was tempted.

Now, if you find this bad-ass romanticized anarchism repellent instead of attractive, you are probably thinking: asshole! Destroying and/or #occupying private property isn’t awesome and punk rock, it’s a total dick move!

Would your response be to advocate a ban on boltcutters?

Probably not terribly likely. They’re useful tools with legitimate purposes.  It’s just you don’t want assholes like me being tempted to misuse them.

But let’s say that Baltimore gets slightly worse and people busting into vacants and squatting is really becoming an issue, so you decide, OK, let’s regulate boltcutters. We want to be able to track people down if they steal a foreclosed house for shelter. We don’t want the cops to confiscate some punk’s boltcutters and then have hir just be able to go buy a new pair at that hipster hardware store.

Of course, this creates consternation and backlash. In particular, some people like me yelling about how private property is theft and if you give the state control of boltcutters, all boltcutters will be used to prop up the state. You counter with all sorts of statistics about how allowing houses to be foreclosed and re-sold rather than tied up with people trying to keep families living in them, or turn them over to commies and the homeless actually helps the market recover faster so that everyone can get their jobs at Lehman Brothers and Sparrow’s Point and Subway back (except not at Sparrow’s Point, you say: suck it, unions!).

Here come the well-meaning public policy types.  They say, look, the stats are never going to convince people like that Wrongzo guy. You have different cultural risk assessments! You’re worried about the value of private property and your 401k, and Wrongzo is worried about the risk of being homeless! You’re talking past each other! What you need to do is meet him on some middle ground, acknowledge his feelings about private property and stuff, and try to find a way to engage with his values.

Here’s where you say: fuck you, thinly veiled gun-debate analogy guy! Wrongzo’s values are communist terrorist values that suck and are wrong! And what happened to nice rappers like Run DMC?

The problem with the policy solution offered is that we’re not arguing about boltcutters.  We’re arguing about class war. If you win on boltcutters at the expense of losing on class war… not a great outcome.

This is why I think the approach that Anotherpanacea (remember those linked posts) is picking up from Braman and Kahan is wrong.

You should read the posts and the paper, but there are two important bits.

1. All the numbers in the world won’t end the US gun control debate, because the debate isn’t about numbers. People who love guns know that they’re deadlier than knives. People who hate guns know that car accidents kill more people each year (for now). But we’re really fighting over the “cultural meaning” of guns. People who love guns love them because they represent individualism and the defense of proper hierarchy. People who hate guns hate them because they represent mutual suspicion instead of solidarity, and the propping up of unjust hierarchy.

2. The way forward is to find a way to create a discourse that recognizes the important cultural meanings of guns to the egalitarians, the authoritarians, and the individualists, and comes up with compromises and grand bargains that makes everyone feel honored. For instance, they suggest that we simultaneously adopt registration (showing that gun owners are willing and required to be responsible to their fellow humans, as egalitarian-solidarists want) and recognize the individual right to bear arms (showing that gun owners will not be stripped of their rights, as individualists want). Anotherpanacea suggests focusing on some of the risks (like harming family members, or facilitating suicide) that guns have that presumably even their ardent supporters don’t want and reducing some of those through licensing, ammunition control, etc.

These solutions are missing the forest for the trees.

Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

Pick up your monocles, gun defenders, this is probably the last thing I’m going to say that you’re going to like.

Or, rather, social hierarchies kill people.

Judith Butler has this wonderful term, “precarity,” that refers to the ways in which social structures expose people to risk and harm. I’m running roughshod over her careful, elaborate, and incomprehensible prose, but the bottom line is this: all life is precarious. We’re all subject to death from a variety of sources at any moment, and death will eventually come to us all.  But the ways that we are exposed to risk are social. I could go to DR Congo and walk around North Kivu at relatively little risk, despite it being an active war zone, because I was hanging with the UN. More generally, I live in Baltimore, one of the most violent cities in America, but the fact that I am white, live in a fairly affluent neighborhood, and don’t buy, sell, or use heroin means that I’m pretty unlikely to become one of the 200+ murder victims we have here each year.

Ultimately, the way a bullet kills you is a brute matter of the physics of metal and meat. But thinking of how people die in the US as a matter of physics is boneheaded.

So I think Anotherpanacea is wrong because he’s got the fight backwards. We’re not fighting guns and being sucked into the quicksand of egalitarian-solidarism vs. hierarchical-individualism. We’re fighting hierarchy and getting sucked into guns.

Take one thing that Anotherpanacea himself has pointed out. If we banned guns nationwide tomorrow, how do you think it would play out?  Would the cops be busting down my door on suspicion that I might have a hunting rifle? Probably not. They’d be stopping and frisking young black men down the street from me, and throwing them in jail. They’d be kicking poor people out of subsidized housing because a family member had a gun.

Take a thing a lot of people have pointed out: pretty much universally, mass shootings are a thing that white men do to other white, relatively affluent people. But the real death toll isn’t driven by spectacular media-friendly killing sprees. It’s the constant drip, drip, drip of blood in urban centers characterized by poverty and inequality.

Take away guns, poof, as if by magic, and what happens? Probably, police use the ban to crack down harder on those we already crack down on. Probably, people in “urban sacrifice zones” keep dying, just not by guns. They’re going to keep dying from malnutrition, stress, lack of education, lack of hope, drugs, pollution, and all the other things besides guns that people need to deal with. All that precarity. The flow of metal into bodies is just one stream in the mighty flow of money and power and fear that characterizes our system.

So, guns, whatever. Take away the fear and hatred that drives the hierarchical-individualist worldview (and its purity norms, on which a future discussion) and probably we have guns that police occasionally use against sociopaths and hunters use to get game meat, and boltcutters I only use on my back gate.  The fight is with hierarchy, not guns.

Take mental illness for one thing. A lot of people have been talking about how we need to take better care of the mentally ill, including the NRA (better care =   government monitoring – one reason my money is on the hierarchical part of the worldview being more important to “gun culture” than the individualist). But most mentally ill people don’t murder anyone - in fact they are more likely to be the subject of violence than its perpetrator. And a lot of folks have arm-chair diagnosed Adam Lanza without much basis other than the fact that, you know, he killed a lot of people.

And hell, if you believe gun deaths are about physics, you’ll believe mental illness is about random organic misfire, rather than about economically-related abuse and the stress of living a precarious life. Just give the poor some Abilify, that will fix the roaches on everything.

Precarity, hierarchy, it’s what’s killing people. Metal and disease and fear just tag along on the flows.

So, this makes me one of the “extremists” that Braman and Kahan worry about. They will find me “obnoxious.” I’m cool with that.

Their approach to the gun debate only works if you take the gun debate as the important focus and cultural worldviews as fixed.  We shouldn’t do either, and I’ve argued for the first bit already.

The second bit, well, a couple years back Anthony Appiah wrote a very interesting little book called The Honor Code. The question was: how did we get big, paradigm-shift moral reforms in history, like the end of dueling, slavery, and foot-binding in China?

I don’t necessarily buy every bit of his analysis, but the core idea is suggestive. Dueling didn’t end because people figured out that it was dangerous. I mean, duh. Dueling ended because it came to be seen as part of a boorish, wasteful, laughable code of “honor” not befitting gentlemen. Similarly with slavery and foot-binding: they ended when they became disreputable. And a major tool in the arsenal was not engaging people and honoring their tender pro-dueling worldview. It was marginalizing and mocking and satirizing and humiliating them.

OK, Marxists, yeah, changing economic modes probably had a lot to do with slavery, that’s part of where I’m not totally with him.

Now, Braman and Kahan specifically call out ridicule as a tactic they don’t approve of, and which they think doesn’t work. I call someone a gun-toting redneck, and they laugh and eat some more saltpeter-flavored pork rinds. No advance.

But let’s target our mockery. I’m not mocking someone for being rural. I’m mocking them for fearing me. For needing to control people to feel good about themselves. For talking like turning lives into meat is cool and fun to pretend at. For worshipping stupid narratives where all solidarity and planning and mutual support is for naught unless that one chosen one they imagine they are saves everyone. For complaining that the poor aren’t grateful enough while clinging to a world-view that pretends people owe nothing to each other. For fearing dependence, decrepitude, infancy, and birth, and hence being willing to sacrifice everyone else on the altar of a continent-wide, 300 million+ member death cult so that we and ours can live a little bit longer.

So, whatever. WordPress and Chrome are literally rebelling at the length of this post and starting to eat my typing. I don’t know if Appiah is right and heaping despite, or even sly humor, on the defenders of hierarchy will actually work. Maybe agriculture already doomed us. I’m sure Anotherpanacea’s quite sober and reasonable policy proposals – that don’t mention death cults or Judith Butler – will advance the ball a bit.

But I want to at least make a plea for us to fight the right fight. And I think that  we can win the battle but lose the war if we regulate guns in a grand bargain to preserve hierarchical-individualism.

Lots of reasonable people are afraid of the noise of a real fight over the cancer of authoritarianism and hierarchy. Me, I’m starting to hate the quiet moments.

 

When we finally start talking about gun control, what should we say?

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I love policy discussions, but the demands for policy discussion on gun control after the shootings in Newtown today are terribly wrong-headed.

The problem is that demanding a policy discussion is not the same thing as having a policy discussion. At this point, we’re just talking about talking about gun control. It’s all “mention” and no “use.” It’d be nice if folks would actually start proposing laws. Like: limits on magazine size. Ammo taxes. Closing the gun show loophole. Or even…

Prohibition.

I’d love to talk about gun prohibition. (Notice, this isn’t even the same policy debate as “gun control.”) Unfortunately, if we start talking about gun prohibition, then we will be forced to confront how badly prohibition is working in other markets. There are three hundred and ten million guns in the US. (Yes! 310,000,000!) What does prohibition look like under those circumstances?

Reflecting on that question, ask yourself this: how many people will be killed in no-knock police raids trying to root out the black market in guns? Will they be mostly white or mostly black? (Notice that gun control laws have tended to be stricter in majority black areas rather than majority white areas. Both DC and Chicago, the battleground states for the 2nd Amendment claims, are disproportionately black.) How many of those killed by police will be kids? How many kids’ deaths will be prevented?

On reflection, I suspect that many gun control regimes and all possible paths to gun prohibtion are more likely to increase the number of people hurt and killed by guns.  So when we do finally start talking about gun control and gun prohibition, let’s be very, very careful.

  • Something must be done.
  • Prohibition is something. 
  • ∴ ????

Also, let’s remember that the violent crime rate, including gun crimes, is the lowest it’s been in 20 years. That doesn’t make what happened today any easier to handle, but perhaps it will allow us to focus on what happened, and the people it happened to, instead of replaying Jon Stewart’s Monday night monologue. Something terrible has happened. It didn’t happen to you or I, so we have the ability to ask whether it could have been prevented. We should ask whether it could have been prevented. But we should also ask: at what cost? Then we should follow that calculation of lives lost and lives saved wherever it leads.

Craig Whitney’s July New York Times Op-Ed on the Aurora shooting is still apropos here:

Liberals should accept that the only realistic way to control gun violence is not by keeping guns out of the hands of as many Americans as possible, but by keeping guns out of the hands of people we all agree should not have them.

Read the whole thing.

“The purpose of law enforcement, with respect to transactional crimes, is to make sure that they have ‘good’ criminals.”

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Keith Humphreys shares this interview with Vanda Felbab-Brown. There are no dull moments, but here’s one I think should give us lefties pause: what will replace the underground marijuana economy? Felbab-Brown explains:

Most of the time governments tend to fight illicit economies and not think about what will replace them. Policies are often premised on the erroneous idea that simply suppressing a particular part of the illicit economy will mean that legality will emerge. Frequently that does not happen, especially when large segments of the population cannot participate in the legal economy and are dependent on illegality for their survival. In those cases in particular, the propensity towards shifting to other forms of illegality is very high. On the other hand, if you have a finite supply of traffickers and a large segment of the population that does not depend on illegality, then it is quite possible that suppression alone will be sufficient, and no replacement economy will arise. In the case of global networks that have large societal dependence and participation in illegality, it is almost impossible to make sure that if you suppress one illicit economy, another one will not emerge.

So it mostly depends on the setting. There are some illicit economies that need to be the priority when it comes to suppression—smuggling nuclear materials, for example. This is an economy that is rather minimal in scale but nonetheless the consequences could potentially be so exorbitant that suppressing it needs to be a priority. The priority, in my view, should be to think about which illicit economy is the most dangerous and poses the greatest harm, and to focus on methods to minimize that economy.

The interpenetration in criminology of economic themes of cost-benefit analysis, unintended consequences, and public choice problems with the epidemiology of violence and an ethics of harm reduction is now almost complete. (What’s missing? Daniel Levine‘s work-in-progress operationalizing care ethics in peacekeeping.)

The Conservative War on Prisons, etc.

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by Seany2000

Via Metafilter’s kliuless (who definitely has a kliu):
  • The Conservative War on Prisons: “Right-wing operatives have decided that prisons are a lot like schools: hugely expensive, inefficient, and in need of root-and-branch reform. Is this how progress will happen in a hyper-polarized world?”
  • Raise The Crime Rate: “Statistics are notoriously slippery, but the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and violence.”
  • The Caging of America: Why do we lock up so many people? ”Six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S.—more than were in Stalin’s gulags.”